Social impacts of technology - Good or Bad?

In order to develop a task which not only engages students in authentic learning but truly benefits student’s education and promotes a high level of intellectual quality and rigour, we must understand the wider context of technology in the classroom and the social impacts it has had on student learning.

It is now being made obvious that in such a technology based fast-paced world, traditional forms of literacy teaching are no longer adequate. Veteran teachers must re-design their style of pedagogy and new teachers must be sure to employ the technology available to them. Such changes in the way literacy is being taught will have huge impacts on us as teachers in training and we must take advantage of the rapidly developing educational world to give our students the best learning and quality teaching as possible. All teachers must recognise that new technology has an implicit place in our education system. If this is not acknowledged and teachers continue to ‘teach as they always have’, employing traditional methods, they compromise their students by placing them in a vulnerable position, unprepared and unaware of the new literacy practices essential for living and working in today’s modern society.

The social impacts of new technology’s on students learning is wide and varied, however I believe one of the most important and significant positive impacts these developments have had is on the lives of disable, sick or isolated students.

Before major advancements in technologies, ‘distance education’ was virtually impossible and home schooling was the only option. Contact with teachers was via mail or phone and these circumstances did not give isolated students the opportunities or education of their suburban counterparts. Students suffering social, mental, physical and learning disabilities have also benefited greatly from technological advancements, creating greater equity within our schooling system.

There are two conflicting sides to the social impacts of technology in the classroom and wider society and whilst some may find plausible negatives, they are greatly outweighed by the numerous advantages, opportunities, greater equity and learning benefits of these technologies.

Multi multi multiliteracies!

This week’s 1751 lecture was focused on multiliteracies and how literacy has been redefined by social, technological and economic change.  For teachers to have the ability to create an online interactive task to support their pedagogy and promote deeper understanding and learning (such as a web quest) displays the ways in which multiliteracy has shaped our modern education system. To be ‘multiliterate’ requires understanding and being able to use the literacy’s of a range of texts and technologies in a socially, culturally and linguistically diverse world. It requires the mastery of communication in different modes of technology, an ability to critically analyse texts and encourages students to be active participants in social change.

The way we have designed our web quest, requiring students to research, analyse film clips and diagrams, create tables, complete online quiz’s and provide a word processed lifestyle plan and letter, we believe we have suitable addressed and promoted the development of multiliterate citizens. By employing pedagogical techniques that utilise technologies in constructive ways to better teach and impart subject content, we are utilising and sharing with others our collaborative technological pedagogical content knowledge.

Teachers use a range of technological tools and their own technological pedagogical content knowledge to facilitate the development of multiliterate students and emphasise the significance of these students work.

As we have come to understand these concepts the development of our own technological pedagogical content knowledge has exploded and helped us to recognise the importance of multiliteracy and how we can tweak our web quest to further facilitate the development of students. 

What's our Pedagogy?

As the designing and creating process of this web quest continues through the collaborative effort of our group, I have noticed that via our simple employment of technology in the classroom we have unintentionally addressed and adhered to the three dimensions of the NSW Quality Teaching Framework. This style of pedagogy we are using displays aspects of authentic e-learning by seamlessly integrating our learning of content and assessment and results in promoting high levels of intellectual quality in the students work.

Through giving the students a web quest to complete, team work, maximum participation and the collaboration of ideas is promoted and encouraged. This nurturing environment created between the students, teacher and task creates a high quality learning environment, aimed at improving student’s involvement and deeper understanding of the subject outcomes.  

The concept of a web quest is extremely clever in engaging so that students would chose to research and participate. Our assessment comprises a range of complex tasks to be investigated collaboratively by students over time and further engages students with the real-world relevance regarding the importance of nutrition and lifestyle choices. These elements of authentic learning work harmoniously together to create an engaging and complex task, demanding higher order thinking and intellectual quality of the students.

Through the way we have designed the task and put the students in charge of the health and wellbeing of a hypothetical family (possibly much like their own) it increases the relevance of the task and its importance to the students. This promotes the children to look past just getting a good mark for this assessment and emphasises the significance of their work in helping others as well as themselves and their wider community.

So in summary of this week’s brainstorm regarding our web quest, we have acknowledged that we have employed the Quality Teaching Model as the pedagogical context of our digital artefact and plan to exploit these dimensions in order to create a quality and significant task. 

Slowly but surely..

Ok, so this meeting was a little more productive because we actually had a room and computer to work with! However we only had access to one computer between the four of us so we weren’t able to work individually on anything and if we needed to show the others something is was a bit annoying and time consuming because we kept having to log off/log on and re-open everything again. Anyway, we had each managed to do a bit of research throughout the week and we spent most of the session running through all the different resources we found and picking out the ones we thought we be most useful for our project. Finding a suitable blogger proved the most difficult and we’re still on the hunt for something. Also we found many of the resources used the ‘healthy food pyramid’ which is actually part of the old recommendations and has now been replaced with the ‘healthy dinner plate’. So finding resources with the most recent information and government recommendations was also a challenge.

We also discussed how we were going to create the different ‘roles’ for students which are characteristic of a Web Quest. We found that if we split the task using the same kind of roles as other Web Quests (researcher, writer, designer etc) we’d have very unequal workloads. Instead, Luke came up with the great idea that each different group member is allocated a different family member and must research and create a lifestyle plan specific to that individuals needs. This splits the workload evenly and easily!

Next meeting we aim to each present some of what we have been working on (or should have been working onJ). For me this will include the intro for the Web Quest, character profiles, the task and a rough idea of the process.

Library Peak Hour

So we were meant to have our second group meeting the following Tuesday but when we all met in the library there was not a single space (let alone computer) in sight! After spending ten minutes searching we decide that from now on we will book a room in the library which has access to a computer so we don’t have to worry about busy days or the many many distractions.

So instead we all discussed our task while standing in line at the hunter cafe to grab some lunch. After having a look through the task we decided the first thing we need to do is start looking for appropriate resources we and the students could use to help them complete the Web Quest set for them. We also quickly brainstormed a few of the Web 2.0 applications which would be most beneficial for our Web Quest.

These included:

• YouTube clip/video addressing a healthy diet and lifestyle
• Blogger site discussing health, weight issues and healthy lifestyle choices
• Creating a quiz using WiziQ

In order to be more prepared for next week’s meeting, each of us is going to do some individual research looking for suitable YouTube clips, blogger sites and resources.

And then it was my job to go and book a room :)

Just getting started

Well this is my first official blog! So to begin ill give a little intro to each of our group members:

Kaitlin: first year PDHPE teaching

Gabby: first year PDHPE teaching (and a bit of a computer whiz which is lucky because the rest of us are pretty hopeless)

Luke: first year History teaching

Laura (me): first year PDHPE teaching

Hopefully this group should work out well as all of us except for Kaitlin live here on campus, making it easier for us to get together to collaborate and share our ideas and work.

So we had figured out a few weeks ago that we were all free on Tuesdays from 12-2. As a result we decided this would be our weekly group meeting time in the library where we could develop our Web Quest, make any important group decisions and collaboratively discuss our ideas.

As the majority of our group were studying PE and Luke had a strong interest in sport anyway, we decided to use dot-points from the PDHPE Stage 4 syllabus as the focus of our Web Quest.  So after choosing the specific outcomes and syllabus strand we were focussing on in our tutorial we organised our first group meeting for the following day. This wasn’t too productive as we were still figuring out what the assignment was all about, however we successfully allocated jobs and an even workload to each of our group members to complete individually.

Next week we hope to have a bit of a clearer idea of what this assignment requires and to achieve this we all are going to do some individual research of good Web Quests to see the format and quality we are striving for.

Monday

This is my first blog!